The Federal Executive Council (FEC) Wednesday approved a new scheme that is targeted at creating employment for 60,000 Nigerians aged 18-25 years.

The Minister of Budget and Planning, Udoma Udoma said the new scheme is called the N-Power knowledge multi-track youth empowerment programme.

Udoma said this while briefing State House correspondents at the end of the meeting of the council chaired by President Muhammadu Buhari.

He said under the scheme, 12,000 unemployed or under-employed graduates aged 18-25 yrs will be trained and given relevant devices afterwards.

The training will be on mobile computing and commonly used electronic devices with the Nigerian Government spending N259,000 per youth while an additional 207,000 will be spent for work tools.

He put the value of the programme at N5,595,669,250 with a completion period of nine months.

The minister said the programme which has been awarded to Softcome Ltd will be run under the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), is open to all unemployed graduates.

He also said after the training, each of the initial 12,000 selected and trained “will be empowered to train five other youth, leading to additional 60,000 jobs.”

In the most recent report by Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics in December unemployment rate stands at 23.1 per cent, up from the previous rate of 18.8 per cent released in the third quarter of 2017.

Partime employment/underemployment slowed to 20.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2018 from 21.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2017.

Although there was a marginal increase in the number of people employed from to 69.09 million in Q3 2017 to 69.54 million in Q3 2018, the total number of people unemployed upped from 17.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2017 to 20.9 million in the third quarter of 2018.